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John Bellairs, Fred Saberhagen and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

John Bellairs, Fred Saberhagen and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

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The House With a Clock in its Walls-smallI know John Bellairs mostly as the author of a host of YA fantasy mysteries — rather dark fantasy mysteries, actually, with a twinge of horror. The first one I purchased was The House With a Clock in its Walls, back when my kids were very young, but I imagined they’d thank me as they grew older and started devouring the fantasy library I’d diligently built for them.

Never happened. Instead, they did the exact same thing I did at their age: found their own books and steadfastly ignored the stuff their boring parents kept recommending.

They read Christopher Paolini’s Eragon series, and Suzanne Collins’s Gregor books, John A. Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice, and Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games. I ended up with stacks of unread John Bellairs titles like The Eyes of the Killer Robot and The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull. At least they looked good on the shelves.

John Bellairs also wrote at least one adult fantasy, The Face in the Frost. And that was apparently enough to win him a space in Gary Gygax’s Appendix N in the back of the Dungeon Masters Guide, which is why we’re talking about him today.

Mordicai Knode and Tim Callahan are examining one Appendix N writer per week at Tor.com, in their Advanced Readings in D&D series. They’ve done 15 installments so far, and for number 16 Tim turns to John Bellairs.

But first, he briefly returns to subject #15, Lin Carter, to say a few words about his exceptional treatise on adult fantasy, Imaginary Worlds.

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The Cleric and the Crucifix

The Cleric and the Crucifix

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vanhelsing

“Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!”

There was something diabolically sweet in her tones — something of the tingling of glass when struck — which rang through the brains even of us who heard the words addressed to another. As for Arthur, he seemed under a spell; moving his hands from his face, he opened wide his arms. She was leaping for them, when Van Helsing sprang forward and held between them his little golden crucifix. She recoiled from it, and, with a suddenly distorted face, full of rage, dashed past him as if to enter the tomb.

So does Dr. John Seward describe the encounter between Abraham Van Helsing and newly-risen Lucy Westenra in Chapter 16 of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I’m not knowledgeable enough in literary vampire lore to be able to say with any certainty that the 1897 novel is the first time we see a bloodsucker recoil from a crucifix, but, even if it’s not, I have little doubt that it was probably the most widely-read and influential example of it. Not only has the novel itself sold untold copies in the English-speaking world alone, but motion picture adaptations, starting with F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized 1922 film, Nosferatu, have added much to the popular conception of “the undead” (to borrow Stoker’s own coinage) – and how to combat them.

In the world of gaming, it’s well-known that the medieval miniatures rules, Chainmail, written by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren, was the immediate predecessor to Dungeons & Dragons, especially its “Fantasy Supplement,” which introduces the option of including magic and monsters so as to “refight the epic struggles related by J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and other fantasy writers.” Even a cursory examination of Chainmail reveals that there’s nary a mention of religion in its pages, including in the Fantasy Supplement. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise, since the priest isn’t a distinct literary archetype in the pulp fantasy literature that inspired Gygax (as revealed in innumerable posts about his Appendix N bibliography on this site and elsewhere). Consequently, Chainmail includes only “heroes” and “wizards” as individual units.

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God Stalk by P. C. Hodgell

God Stalk by P. C. Hodgell

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God Stalk P. C. Hodgell-smallOut of the haunted north comes Jame the Kencyr to Rathilien’s greatest city, Tai-Tastigon. From the hills above, the city appears strangely dark and silent. She arrives at its gates with large gaps in her memory and cat claws instead of fingernails. She’s carrying a pack full of strange artifacts, including a ring still on its owner’s finger… and she’s been bitten by a zombie. Wary, but in desperate need of a place to heal, Jame enters the city. So begins God Stalk, the first book in P.C. Hodgell’s Kencyrath series and one of my absolute, bar none, don’t-bother-me-if-you-see-me-reading-it, favorite fantasy novels.

When this book first came out in paperback in 1983, my friend Carl bought it at the original NYC Forbidden Planet on 13th Street. Raving about it, he tossed it to me. Then I passed it to someone else. By the time it finished its circuit through the rest of my friends and back to its original owner, its cover was bent, stained, and more than a little torn. I’ve gone through several copies myself over the years, having lost or upgraded it multiple times. When I reread it this past week, I was excited that I enjoyed it as much as, if not more than, I had in the past. I’m so grateful Carl gave me this book thirty years ago. P.C. Hodgell seems so far below the general fantasy radar, I don’t know if I would have ever heard of her at all, which is pretty darn shameful.

The Kencyr are a group of three races sworn to the service of the Three-Faced God and bound together by him to fight Perimal Darkness, a warping force of chaos and evil sweeping over the planes of existence. The rulers of the Kencyr are the human-looking High Born, of which Jame is one. The warriors and artisans are the Kendar, still human-looking but larger and longer-lived. Finally, there are the giant catlike Arrin-Ken, the judges.

As Jame remembers bits and pieces of her missing life, an eons-old struggle against the Darkness is revealed to the reader. The Kencyr fled to Rathilien three thousand years ago after betrayal at the highest level almost led to their extinction. Jame may have an important place in the war and among her people, though every answer leads to another question, some not answered until much later in the series.

The history of the Kencyr and their endless war are really only the background for God Stalk. This novel centers on Jame’s adventures during a year in Tai-Tastigon. From the night of her arrival during the Feast of the Dead Gods, her residency in the great city is one of constant action and intrigue.  She has entanglements with bandits, thieves, innkeepers, and deities. It’s a dangerous place, but also enticing.

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New Treasures: Cold and Dark

New Treasures: Cold and Dark

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Cold and Dark-smallI couldn’t go to Gencon in August. I had to work. Someone had to — the rent on our spacious rooftop headquarters here in downtown Chicago doesn’t pay itself.

Certain members of our staff did attend that august gathering, however. I’m not going to point any fingers, but I will point you, without comment, to Howard Andrew Jones’s GenCon Writer’s Symposium 2013 and Andrew Zimmerman Jones’s three-part (three-part! That’s how much fun you can have at Gencon) Post-Convention Recap. That’s right. While some us were putting in long hours, trying to finish that scathing expose on the use of polluted air in model zeppelins, everyone on staff named Jones got to go Indianapolis to party. But I’m not bitter.

I’m lying. I’m totally bitter. What’s a guy got to do to keep up with the Joneses around here? It’s not just all the fun they had; it’s the fantastic loot they brought back. Like Cold and Dark, a new RPG of gritty science fiction horror from Chronicle City — publishers of Dungeonslayers, Achtung! Cthulhu, and the upcoming Punktown — which draws inspiration from Pitch Black, Dead Space, and other classics of dark SF. Here’s the back-cover copy:

Centuries from now mankind lives on in the Sirius galaxy, an enormously vast and dense system of stars. It’s a greedy industrial society run by corporations and the Governmental Industrial Complex. The onslaught of strip-mining has stirred something terrible best left buried and forgotten.

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Oz Revives The Screaming Skull!

Oz Revives The Screaming Skull!

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screaming skull coverA few years back, I had the pleasure of reviewing B-movies on a page hosted by Nathan Shumate’s Cold Fusion Video Reviews. Yes, I was part of his cabal of Cold Fusioneers — not to be confused with early scientific researchers into the elusive possibilities of cold fusion. Until a “catastrophic server failure” wiped out the main site and all the ancillary sites it hosted, Cold Fusion had been one of the longest-running review sites on the Internet.

Nathan decided to retire Cold Fusion and pursue other popular web projects he has launched, but I still have my reviews safely stored on a hard drive, the only place they currently exist…until now! As part of my October “five weeks of frights,” I’ve dug up my review of The Screaming Skull (1958), a fun film to watch this time of year. Some Black Gate readers will also take note that this film allegedly was inspired by a short story of the same name by classic weird-story author F. Marion Crawford.

[And if you wonder “What’s up with this David guy?” with whom I co-hosted the review, stick around to see my explanation at the end of the post.]

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DAVID: This is a Manning’s Manly Movies review that reaches its climax in shocking horror. Its impact is so terrifying that it may have an unforeseen effect. It may KILL you! Therefore the reviewers feel it necessary to provide free flowers to anyone who dies of fright while reading THIS REVIEW!

OZ:  What are you doing?

DAVID:  A-ha! About time you pulled your head up out of your books long enough to review another movie with me, professor!

OZ:  What were you doing?

DAVID:  I’m borrowing an idea from the producers of this week’s movie. When The Screaming Skull was screened in theaters back in the fifties, the movie opened with a voice-over narrator as a casket lid slowly opened, revealing a burial contract inside…

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Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1951: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1951: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951-smallThe May, 1951 issue of Galaxy featured the first installment of a new novel, two novelets and two short stories.

By this point, I would think readers would be thrilled by this magazine. It’s amazing to consider how many of its stories were later reprinted, and how so many authors became legendary in the field (if they were not already so).

“Bridge Crossing” by Dave Dryfoos — Roddie grew up among androids and is the only human left within the city of San Francisco. There are other humans who live outside the city and raid it for supplies; Roddie views them as enemies. One night, he finds one and decides to act friendly to the woman to learn more about his enemies. Despite their commonality, he is determined to remain allied with his android friends.

Dave Dryfoos had over 20 published stories between 1950 and 1955. And that was it. He didn’t die until 2003, but I can’t find information on why he seemed to stop writing in 1955 (if that’s in fact what happened).

At any rate, “Bridge Crossing” is an interesting tale and I only had a feel for where it was going, not a definite sense (which kept it tense). And it had a great last line.

“Mars Child” (Part 1) by Cyril Judd — Mars is colonized by pioneering humans, some of whom feel like Mars is a second chance to populate a planet without all of the pollution on Earth. The Sun Lake colony depends on trade with Earth to thrive, but the colonists hope to one day sever ties with Earth — to be completely independent. Dr. Tony Hellman, one of the colony’s council members, delivers a newborn to eager parents, but his main duties include assessing the radioactive levels of their exports.

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Its [It’s] Q: The Winged Serpent on Blu-ray!

Its [It’s] Q: The Winged Serpent on Blu-ray!

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Q Winged Serpent Blu-ray CoverQ (1982)
Written, Produced, and Directed by Larry Cohen. Starring Michael Moriarty, David Carradine, Candy Clark, Richard Roundtree.

You want to know something that rocks? Actually, two things that rock, at least in my little world:

1. The Chrysler Building

2. Giant Monsters

So when you have a movie about a giant flying monster nesting in the Chrysler Building, you have something that rocks so hard it makes Van Halen sound like One Direction. Again, at least in my little world.

Video distributor Shout! Factory continued its stellar series of classic B-movie releases on Blu-ray in September with the HD debut of Q. This 1982 sleeper hit, concerning the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl (or a non-god of the same name) appearing in New York City as a humungous flying snake that likes to snap the heads off window washers and topless sunbathers, was always crying out for Shout! Factory to pluck it up.

The company has packaged the film with its alternate marketing title, Q: The Winged Serpent, and repeated the original tagline over the Boris Vallejo artwork: “It’s name is Quetzalcoatl… Just call it ‘Q’… that’s all you’ll have time to say before it tears you apart!” However, Shout! Factory fixed the original poster’s grammatical error, correcting It’s to Its. That is one of the few disappointments I have with their presentation of this nifty low budget flick; I know Shout! Factory doesn’t want to seem careless on the cover for their product, but that grammatical glitch adds charm to the story of a clueless low-life criminal/jazz pianist who holds New York hostage with a winged snake.

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Spotlight on Fantasy Webcomics: The Dirt on Ursula Vernon’s Hugo Award Winner, Digger

Spotlight on Fantasy Webcomics: The Dirt on Ursula Vernon’s Hugo Award Winner, Digger

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Digger Volume 1 Ursula Vernon
Cover of Digger Volume 1 by Ursula Vernon from Sofa Wolf Press

I read a lot of webcomics. Back when I was writing Cowboys and Aliens II for Platinum, I started reading a bunch of the comics that were up on the now-defunct Drunk Duck and I got hooked.

What happens when you start reading webcomics is that you often follow links to other webcomics, until your bookmarks bar is full of comics you’re following on a regular basis and your inbox is full of recommendations from friends of the comics you should be following. That e-mail from a friend is how I discovered Digger by Ursula Vernon, which was the Hugo Award Winner for best graphic story and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award winner, both in 2012.

It starts with an anthropomorphic wombat named Digger who, by page 6, has met a statue avatar of the god of wisdom Ganesh. Wombats being a race of logically minded architects and engineers, they don’t care much for gods and magic — but Digger is thrust into the middle of a story that has both. Magic has deliberately interfered with her tunnel, something no wombat takes kindly, and her sense of direction is askew, meaning she can’t get home until Ganesh helps her figure out just where home is from where she’s ended up.

While researching a trip home might seem like a harmless endeavor, it’s not as simple as it sounds, and soon Digger is up to her ears in strange characters: a young healer known only as the Hag, a shadow child who might or might not be a demon, an unnamed hyena exile who Digger calls Ed, a female warrior monk who is probably insane, and a whole tribe of hyena people who might want to eat her.

This might sound like a lot of silliness in one webcomic, and Digger has its share of humorous moments. But what happens between the words, the art, and the story is the stuff of magic — quite possibly the kind that Digger herself would approve of.

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Daughter of the Bright Moon by Lynn Abbey

Daughter of the Bright Moon by Lynn Abbey

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oie_6554332ckBTZkt Daughter of the Bright Moon (1979) by Lynn Abbey has been sitting on my swords & sorcery to-be-read pile for a long time. One of the main goals I set for myself when I started blogging was to read all the classic era S&S I could. Not only does DotBM date from S&S’s golden age in the 1970s, its hero, Rifkind, is one of the earlier sword-swinging women. This was a book that demanded a look.

Even with all that going for it, I didn’t get to it until last week. Every now and then, I felt like it was staring at me, admonishing me for not having read it already. I mean, I’ve known about it since I read a fun write-up on Rifkind in the Giants in the Earth column in Dragon Magazine #57 and my dad actually had a copy in the attic.

I even started it last year, but stopped after a chapter or two. I don’t know why… I liked it, but maybe something shiny caught my eye.

Warrior women characters have been around forever. There are the myths of the Amazons and the valkyrie. In real life, of course, there was Joan of Arc.

Jirel of Joiry was the first swordswoman to star in her own stories. C. L. Moore created her kick-ass French noblewoman in 1934, but for decades after that you really had to dig to find fighting women as the lead protagonists.

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Self-Published Book Review: Mistress of the Dancing Bones by Thomas Alexander

Self-Published Book Review: Mistress of the Dancing Bones by Thomas Alexander

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Dancing-Bones-CoverThis month’s self-published book is Mistress of the Dancing Bones by Thomas Alexander.

Four hundred years ago, the Deathlords threatened to destroy all of humanity. It was the nephilim who saved the human race. Thus was the Code Sanguine founded: humans swore to serve the nephilim, and if required, give them their blood, while the nephilim swore to protect humanity, and raise the best of the humans to nephilim themselves. For before the Code Sanguine, the nephilim were known by another name: vampires.

Ashia is the daughter of a nephilim warlord, Marcel Boucher, and his human wife. This does not make her a nephilim, or even part nephilim. She is fully human until embraced by the nephilim. She is also, thanks to her mother, Dahraki, one of the dragon-blooded, and that gives her access to another kind of magic, the necromancy of the Than Khet. Unfortunately, the servant who secretly tutored her in Than Khet magic neglected to tell her that it is incompatible with becoming nephilim. Should a Than Khet be embraced as a nephilim, she would go mad as the two parts of herself warred.

When he discovers what has happened, Ashia’s father is furious. All his dreams for his daughter have come crashing down. But larger problems plague Ashia’s family. Renegade vampires are plaguing Marcel’s territory and the family’s enemies are placing the blame squarely on Marcel and his willingness to embrace barbarians rather than civilized Avensh as nephilim. In order to discover the truth, Ashia agrees to accompany the legendary nephilim witch-hunter Dusang and his demon-cat-fey ally, Tama, in tracking down the renegades and discovering the truth behind a conspiracy that involves not only renegades and political enemies, but the Deathlords themselves.

I am generally not a fan of vampire novels. I prefer my vampires as antagonists rather than as love interests. And for the love of God, sunlight better burn, or at least weaken, them, not cause them to sparkle. So I was taking a chance on this novel, but I’m glad I did.

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